Public key certificates are electronic documents signed by a trusted issuer and used to attest to the binding of a user's name to a public key and other related data. Certificates provide assurance to the public that the public key identified in the certificate is owned by the user whose name is in the certificate. Major standards which describe public key certificate systems include ITU-T X.509 The Directory—Authentication Framework, and American Bankers Association ANSI X9.30-Part 3: Certificate Management for DSA (draft). Many implementations impose a hierarchical structure in which each trusted issuer, referred to as a Certification Authority (CA) certifies keys for entities that are subordinate to it. The CA affixes a digital signature to the electronic document in a way that is verifiable (one can prove that the CA signed the document) and cannot be forged (one can be assured to a high level of confidence that no one other than the CA signed the document). For example, at the top of the CA hierarchy there may be relatively few “root” CAs, perhaps one per country which certify subordinate CAs. Below the root CAs in the hierarchy, high level CAs (perhaps banks) certify lower level CAs beneath them (e.g., companies), which in turn sign individual user certificates.
A CA's signature becomes more valuable as it creates a large hierarchy of users beneath it and uses its signature key to sign the certificates of both high-value users and subordinate CAs. The CA's signature key then also becomes a more likely target for terrorists, criminals bent on economic gain, and foreign military and espionage services bent on economic spying or de-stabilizing the economy via information warfare. All these issues also apply with equal force to keys used to sign electronic representations of money.
Thus far, the need for security of a CA's private signature key has been addressed by providing a “certificate signing unit” (CSU), which is a tamper-proof secure module satisfying standards set forth in Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) PUB 140-1, level 3 or 4 as issued by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Such a CSU generates its public/private signature key pair internally, “confines” the private signature key securely and permanently inside an area of the device that cannot be read externally, and outputs only the corresponding public key, which will be used to verify its signatures. One CSU available from Bolt, Baranek, and Newman of Boston, Mass. (BBN) is configured to allow a back-up version of its private signature key to be created using a “K-of-N threshold” scheme, in which the private key is split into N shares and placed on small plastic data-keys, each of which contains a memory chip. The data-keys are a patented product of Datakey, Inc. of Burnsville, Minn. Then, should the CSU device be destroyed, a quorum of at least K data-keys can reconstruct the private key.
At least one major security standards body, the American Bankers Association ANSI X9.F1 committee on cryptographic security in wholesale banking applications has recommended that CSU's should be designed to forbid any export of the private key from the device in any form in order to prevent any possible unauthorized theft and use of the key. This approach would require an elaborate procedure for disaster recovery, involving the use of several key pairs simultaneously. Because a single key would exist only in a single CSU at a single site, the loss of a CSU or of a site would force the CA to use another key pair in order to continue business. This would require the CA to publicize and/or securely distribute several (at least two or three) public keys, each identified by a distinct code number (e.g., BT01, BT02, BT03), so that users could continue to verify the signatures that the CA would issue after one CSU (possibly containing the private key for BT01) had been destroyed. See X9.30-Part 3 concerning procedures for disaster recovery.